Not sure whether I'm misinterpreting what you said, but the Digital I/O has three electrical connections (Ground, DigIn, DigOut). The supplied cable works perfectly as you can plug the 3.5mm jack in the Archos and the RCAs to your Digital In/Out (I can't remember which is which, either - Red for Record (DigIn) seems to ring a bell). Things that caught me out when I first did this are:

1. Be careful that you don't get feedback when both DigIn and DigOut are connected. That is, make sure you don't feed DigOut back into DigIn - this has a really weird effect on the recorded sound.
2. The Archos cannot resample if your source sample rate is above 48kHz. My SB Audigy defaults to 96kHz and had me scratching my head for a few minutes.

I'm not a big believer in the need for gold connections. While undoubtedly better (in an engineering sense). I've never had a problem with good quality, clean, standard connectors - particularly for digital data.

Steve.

"Chris Holt" <amiga2k_at_cox.net> wrote in message news:001801c28a16$b053f100$bf00a8c0_at_hr.cox.net...
> ----- Original Message -----
> The Digital in/out jack on the Archos is only a 2 wire jack, so I don't see
> where using a stereo patch cable will benefit you any. It only creates an
> added step of finding out which of the two RCA connectors must be used.
> Archos describes using the supplied patch cable for digital recording and
> playback in the manual as a convienence, I believe.
>
> Chris
>
>